upgrading help

[dadnjesse]

I have a dell xps 600 with a Intel pentium Extreme 955, nvidia 7900 GTX SLI, Im not sure about the mobo but it does say Nvidia on it. Anyway I want to upgrade for gamming,
I know my video cards are outdated, but what about this prosseser? I'm thinking abouy the Intel q6600 and the Nvidia 780i motherboard. Would this prosseser be an upgrade?
Thanks for any help!

 

[secretanchitman]

i doubt its upgradeable....sorry dude. it'll probably use the intel 925XE chipset, and if any better, the 945/955. if it has 945/955, it might be able to support the first generation of c2ds (the board will NOT support ANY quad core cpus). other then that...no luck. same with the motherboard. dell uses a proprietary mobo so you cant rip it out and use it in another computer, as well as swapping out mobos in the same case.

you CAN however, put in a new video card. although then there is the question of your psu and how many watts it has. ive been told/ive heard that dell psus are underrated in terms of watts so a 250W can really power up to 300, maybe even 350W. im not too sure about that one.

i would suggest just building a whole new computer and buying every component seperately.

 

[brassbin]

I would think a power supply that can support SLI'ed 7900GTX's would be able to handle even a single 8800 Ultra.

 

[dadnjesse]

You mean I can't swap out the motherboard, Why? The power supply is 650 w

 

[Mondoman]

It's got an nVidia chipset on the MB that supports 2 true x16 PCIexpress graphics slots (see http://www.extremetech.com/art...0,1558,1845014,00.asp). For gaming, 2 fast cores is still better than 4 slower cores on the CPU side, and your Pentium EE 955 isn't so shabby. Since you can't upgrade to a Core2-based CPU with that MB, and you'd have to buy a new copy of Windows and deal with the hassles of reinstalling it and your apps if you swapped MBs, I see two possibilities:
1) Just upgrade the graphics. Go with your choice of 8800-based graphics cards. Since graphics is the key for performance anyway, this is the easiest, cheapest and best way to go IMHO.
2) Start over and build a new system, selling the XPS.
Since Intel will be introducing new CPUs and DDR3 will be moving towards the mainstream during 2008, going with option 1 will give you another year or two of good use out of the system, then allow you to buy a motherboard with the new socket used by Intel's upcoming integrated-memory-controller CPUs and DDR3 RAM. Otherwise, you'll end up with a MB with soon-to-be obsolescent LGA775 CPU socket and DDR2 RAM.

 

[secretanchitman]

Originally posted by: brassbin
I would think a power supply that can support SLI'ed 7900GTX's would be able to handle even a single 8800 Ultra.

lol i noticed that after i re-read the OPs post....

yeah...i would wait for the new generation of video cards and get that. or if you want, build a new computer with core 2 duo if you REALLY want to get a faster machine.